Peropis’s terrorized shriek battered against Kian, and the floor suddenly tilted as if he were drunk. Despite this, he stood firm as the throne room began rolling like sea swells. Cracks swarmed across the marble floor, crept up the magnificent walls. Peropis, Eater of the Damned, Queen of Demons and Ruler of Geh’shinnom’atar, fell into a crouch.
“So it begins,” she hissed, her thrashing shape seeming to shrink in on itself, growing darker and smoother, more human. “We are not finished, you and I,” she warned. “A new age has dawned, an age of power, of darkness and light. You have not won, Kian Valara. You have but glimpsed the opening door that has released the mahk’lar, and tasted powers never meant for mortal flesh.”
Before he could respond, she threw herself into the portal. A low, resonant groan, just on the edge of hearing, rippled through the Golden Hall as the aberrant rip between worlds vanished. All went deathly still, the blue aura vanished, the world ceased shaking, and Kian felt himself falling.
Chapter 54
Kian opened his eyes to find Ellonlef looking at him with concern. Over her shoulders, Azuri and Hazad peered down, as well. “A dream,” he muttered, his tongue thick.
“It is no dream,” she said. Her grin, hesitant yet glorious, filled him with joy. “We are alive.”
“How?”
“You did it,” she answered, a touch of wonder in her voice. “You filled us with life. We were dead, gone from this world, and you pulled us back.”
“Gone,” Kian mumbled, remembering with renewed horror the manner of their deaths. Despite himself, he asked the only question he could. “Where were you?”
“Paradise,” his three companions answered in unison, their combined voices melodic with a reverence that he could not fathom.
“Or, at least someplace like it,” Ellonlef added. “A place of light and warmth and peace.”
“You’ll have to tell me that story, but later,” Kian said, for now wanting to revel in the certainty that his friends and Ellonlef were alive and well and with him. I will spend the rest of my days with her, he thought, knowing it for the absolute truth.
For a time they all basked in the glow of victory and friendship, trading smiles and saying nothing. No words were necessary. Finally, Kian urged them to help him up, but found that he did not need their aid. He felt as strong and as hale as ever he had.
When he stood among them, he took in his surroundings. The throne room was a shambles, barely recognizable as the near legendary Golden Hall, but he did not have long to consider this before the great doors leading into the great hall burst open. A dozen soldiers of the Crimson Scorpion legion surged through the doorway, weapons held at the ready. They halted abruptly in the face of meeting only Kian’s small company, who stood their ground with a calm, peaceful self-assurance. All the men dripped sweat and blood, their faces were flushed with the heat of battle.
After a moment of tense silence, an order went up from behind the soldiers and they parted ranks. Prince Sharaal Kilvar strode purposefully into the hall. Sharaal was a large man for an Aradaner, and Kian had no trouble seeing the likeness between him and his dead son. It troubled him no small measure to note that besides their physical similarities, they shared a common highborn arrogance in the set of their features. That aspect strongly suggested that had Varis thought to rise above himself under ordinary circumstances, Sharaal would have dealt with him just as harshly as he had intended to do now.
“If you are protecting the murdering usurper,” Sharaal said without preamble, his voice calm, deep, and full of menace, “the tale of your agonies will haunt the sleep of Ammathor’s children for an age.”
After facing Peropis, Kian almost laughed aloud at that pathetic threat. Instead, he studied the man before him. From Sharaal’s shoulders hung a thick, green woolen cloak edged in clothe-of-gold, and from head-to-foot he wore leathers trimmed in sable. He looked like a northern huntsman. His dark top-lock was shot through with the first streaks of iron gray, and was held in place by a leather thong.
“Your son is dead,” Kian said flatly, “and likely dancing to the tune of Peropis herself.” His companions shifted at this, but none betrayed that they knew Kian’s words to be as true as any ever spoken.
“My sons died on the mountain,” Sharaal corrected icily. “Varis, the shame of my loins, died to me when he slaughtered my father, thinking to raise himself to the Ivory Throne. Where is the traitor’s corpse?”
Kian nodded to the charred husk curled amid a rectangle of ashes where the table had stood, just at the place where Peropis’s portal to the Thousand Hells had been.
Sharaal gazed on the blackened shape and the heaped ash, his hard features quizzical. “How did this happen?”
“The Blood of Attandaeus,” Kian said promptly, “the Nectar of Judgment.”
The words were out of his mouth before he had time to consider them, having come from the memory of seeing Hya sprinkling dark red crystals around the wicks of her candles. He was not sure why he did not simply tell what had happened, the whole of it, beginning with the lost temple in the marshes, to Varis freeing of demons into the world, and lastly about the powers of creation his son had stolen for himself. All he knew was that the lie was out, and that he felt disinclined to reveal the truth to this man. Such instincts had saved his skin before, and he relied on them now.
“By blood or by water, by oil or by wine,” Kian explained further, “all liquids set the substance alight. In quantity, it burns through flesh or iron, and nothing will smother the flames before the substance is spent.”
Sharaal considered this. “Such must have been the way of my father’s murder,” he said quietly. Then, unexpectedly, he burst out laughing. “To hear it told, the usurper used some manner of otherworldly witchcraft. There was even rumor that he had raised an army in the west! Fools will believe anything,” he added, suggesting he had never believed anything of the sort. He turned a shrewd eye on Kian. “Tell me, Izutarian, how you came to be here, and why?”
Still untrusting of this new king, Kian doled out a measure of truth generously mingled with deceit. “It was I and my company whom Varis employed to take him west, across the Kaliayth. Apparently the youth had read something,” he said vaguely, “about a secret substance that could change the face of the world. As it happens, he found it on that journey. I only regret that his intentions were dishonorable.”
Sharaal nodded. “Ever was Varis studious,” he said, forgetting for the moment that he had disowned his treacherous son. “Where his brothers found pleasures in the hunt and pleasuring themselves with maidens, Varis spent his day deep in the Hall of Wisdom, reading … always reading. Little did any of us know he was plotting evil as well.” His eyes grew hard again. “Still, that does not tell me why you are here.”
“After the prince slaughtered most of my company,” Kian said simply, “I followed him here, hoping to give warning to the Ivory Throne of his intentions, which he boasted of after attacking my men. As you well know, I was too late in bringing my warning. In the end, I faced Varis here-and here, his weapon turned on him.”
Sharaal considered that for a time. “As a rule, I should order your execution for threatening a member of my House … yet, as I have said, my son died to me in his betrayal. That he perished by his own traitorous hand further absolves you of any guilt, and proves that the gods, though they hang scorched in the heavens, still mind the affairs of men.”